University of Texas at Austin Archives

The Brands of Garrison Hall at its Centennial

Banner for The Brands of Garrison Hall by J. R. Campos

As the Roaring Twenties hummed on, a brand-new building was erected on the grassy slopes of central campus at The University of Texas at Austin. A crew of around 50 to 60 people, working with eight car loads of stone, six stone cutters, and ten lathers, pieced together what would become Garrison Hall at breakneck speed.[1] On December 9, 1925, the building’s ceremonial cornerstone, still visible today, was laid, at a time when faith in science and its capacity to uncover objective facts was in full bloom. It was to be, according to renowned economist and then-president Dr. Walter Splawn, a place “free and unhampered in the search of truth” for the social sciences. The building was named after George Pierce Garrison, the first chair of the History Department and one of the founders of the Texas State Historical Association. The faculty building committee, led by philosopher William J. Battle from 1920 to 1949, chose to feature thirty-two cattle brands on the frieze beneath the building’s cornices and upper-floor window frames. No one on the committee could claim sole credit for an idea that seemed to have emerged from the broader cultural atmosphere of the period.[2]

Garrison Hall as it looks today, one hundred years after its construction. Photograph by the author.

Those cattle-brand medallions are more than architectural flourishes of what became the History Department building. The building was to be a “permanent monument to immortalize the history of the Southwest” through one of the region’s defining economic activities and cultural symbols: cattle ranching.[3] They were meant to symbolize what had been the beating heart of Texas, just as that era gave way to barbed wire, industrial livestock, and iron horses. By the 1920s, industrial modernization, agricultural crisis, and the rise of the oil industry were reshaping Texas. Agricultural and animal product prices collapsed after Europe’s recovery following World War I, while oil extraction emerged as one of Texas’s defining economic forces. It was under these circumstances that, in 1922, the University of Texas, then just a handful of brick buildings with temporary wooden shacks, began planning an expansion. Those plans received an unexpected boost the following year, when an oil reserve was discovered on university lands in the Permian Basin of West Texas. Santa Rita Well No. 1, now memorialized on the southern edge of campus, began producing oil, generating revenue that helped propel the University’s ongoing expansion. The most significant example was the construction of Memorial Stadium in 1924, named in honor of World War I veterans.[4] That same year, renowned New York architect Cass Gilbert was ousted amid pressure from local firms to hire a Texas architect, and a new architectural team was brought in to redesign the 1922 expansion plan. Garrison Hall therefore began its construction under two Texas architects, Herbert M. Greene of Dallas and Robert Leon White of Austin, and the Illinoisan James White.[5]

The pressure to oust Gilbert was part of a broader, emerging regionalism and a growing confidence that Texas itself could and should shape the University’s development. The American Southwest, long viewed as a backward periphery of the United States, was beginning to assert itself. With growing pride in its identity, history, and culture, Texas began to recast itself less through its Southern and Civil War associations and more as a western frontier society defined by ranches, cowboys, longhorns, and open ranges.[6] While UT professors Garrison, Eugene Barker, and Walter Prescott Webb were laying the bricks of the now traditional, and rather Anglo-centric, history of the Lone Star State, western dime novels were pouring into the market. Zane Grey, a writer of western adventure novels, by far outsold the more prestigious modernist authors of the time, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Scott Fitzgerald.[7] “Westerns, westerns and more westerns,” read a Burlington Hawk Eye of Iowa in 1926, as “a western a day makes good movie paid” became the motto of the burgeoning Hollywood film industry.[8] These western stories helped make longhorns, ranching, and cattle brands recognizable and popular icons of Texas identity.

The laying of the cornerstone of Garrison Hall, 1925. Source: The Cactus, University of Texas at Austin, 1926.

For these symbols to appear in westerns and popular fiction, however, they first had to exist in oral memory and the folklore movement. J. Frank Dobie led the Texas Folklore Society alongside his friend John Lomax. Together, they provided the raw material for the construction of an increasingly nostalgic vision of the Southwest. Dobie spent his childhood on a ranch near the Nueces River and grew up to become a Master of Literature at Columbia University. But he fell short of a Ph.D., since he never adapted to a New York culture he saw as snobbish for disdaining his cattle-ranching background. He came back to UT as an English instructor from 1914 to 1916, only to find himself marginalized again. After serving in World War I without seeing active combat, he returned to Texas and pursued folklorism, the study of local legends, stories, and oral traditions, which had long been his passion. By 1923, Texas folklorism had gained wider public recognition, with Dobie emerging as one of its leading figures. He was subsequently hired without a doctoral diploma as a full professor at the Oklahoma A&M College (now Oklahoma State University) and appointed chair of its English Department. In 1925, however, UT Austin successfully recruited him back.[9] He went on to build his career writing about the fading world of Texas ranching, producing works such as Vaquero of the Brush Country, Coronado’s Chickens, The Longhorns, and The Mustangs.

The Old Main Building at The University of Texas at Austin in 1903. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Garrison Hall under construction, pictured in the 1926 Cactus yearbook. Source: The Cactus, University of Texas at Austin, 1926.

As modernization advanced, nostalgia for the world left behind kept growing. This enabled figures like Dobie to become spokespeople for a bygone era, revaluing regional history and tradition as worthy of academic study. In a lecture to a large crowd in the summer of 1926, when the facade of Garrison Hall was just completed, he argued that folklore is the fabric through which literature and culture are made. He then pointed to the cattle brands at Garrison Hall as an example of folklore and tradition naturally growing into art and culture.[10] Viewed through Dobie’s career, we can see that Garrison Hall’s cattle brands were more than a casual decorative choice. They were part of a larger cultural moment when Texans made ranching folklore a central symbol of their identity, just as the old frontier that had produced that world faded into the past. It was only fitting that the university’s new history building would try to preserve that past by turning it into stone.

The building committee assigned UT’s librarian and Texas historian Ernest William Winkler, student of Garrison, Eugene Barker, and Frederick Jackson Turner, to survey and select the brands for Garrison Hall.[11] After an exhaustive six months of reviewing twenty thousand brands, he selected thirty-two. He balanced four criteria: historical periods, regional representation, visual appeal, and donors and benefactors. Readers can identify each one using the brand locator at the end of the article.

“Saving the Longhorn,” Mt. Pleasant Pyramid, October 15, 1926 (right).

Newspaper coverage of Garrison Hall’s cattle brands in 1926: “Brands in Stone,” Brownwood Bulletin, May 13, 1926 (left), and “Saving the Longhorn,” Mt. Pleasant Pyramid, October 15, 1926 (right). Source: NewspaperArchive.

The first period was defined as the Spanish and Tejano “pioneers” who introduced ranching to Texas, such as the Pedro Ibarbo and Mariano Sanchez brands. Notable among this group is the oldest of the thirty-two brands, that of José Antonio de la Garza, known as el flaco (the skinny one), who lived through the tumult of Mexico’s independence wars of the 1810s. The rebellion against the Spanish Crown reached Texas in 1813, followed by the brutal pacification by royalist commander Joaquín de Arredondo. As a result, ranches were ravaged, and large numbers of cattle were dispersed. Many of the ranches that survived the mayhem also changed hands. But de la Garza did more than preserve his estate. He became one of the leaders who organized roundups to recover and redistribute cattle that had been scattered and intermingled for years, many of them completely unbranded.[12] His brand is the first one, from right to left, on the upper northern side of the Hall.

The second period was meant to represent the first American ranching brands, most notably Stephen Austin’s, which was placed on the west-side main entrance, below the right upper-floor window. His brand was also known as the “Spanish Austin Brand” since its shape follows the traditional Hispanic style, very similar to de la Garza’s. Stephen Austin inherited his father Moses’s contract from the Spanish Crown, and later from Mexico, to settle families in Texas in the 1820s. When Santa Anna’s army invaded Texas in 1836, the main body of the Mexican army reached the Brazos River and survived by eating scattered cattle it found along the way, some of which probably bore Austin’s brand. Many colonists fled toward Louisiana or Galveston Island in what became known as the Runaway Scrape. Austin, meanwhile, was in the United States advocating for Texas independence after his imprisonment in Mexico. He returned to Texas later in 1836 and died that December. Many cattle dispersed into the wild again, adding to the already substantial feral herds that would later become associated with Texas Longhorns.

Cattle brands of José Antonio de la Garza (left) and Stephen F. Austin (right) on Garrison Hall. Photographs by the author.

The third period highlighted the trail-driving era, which flourished after the Civil War, when cowboys drove herds hundreds of miles to northern markets. These trails became legendary because they required immense skill to control large Longhorn herds, many of which had been rounded up from a semi-feral state. Cowboys also had to contend with all kinds of rustlers and raiders along the routes. Ike T. Pryor, who helped Winkler in his search, belonged to this group. He began driving Longhorns to Kansas as a young man and later built his career around the 77 brand, located on the north side of Garrison Hall.

Preston R. Rose, whose 7-A brand was placed on the south-side frieze, introduced methods such as fencing and breeding that became the norm by the time Garrison Hall was built. By 1926, with the arrival of barbed wire and the introduction of “improved” breeds, such as Angus, the once-abundant feral and semi-feral herds of Longhorns were on the edge of extinction. That same year, the Texas Folklore Society pushed for the preservation of “pure blood Longhorns”, which led to the first protected herd on the Wichita National Forest Wildlife Refuge.[13] Garrison Hall followed the same impulse to preserve that mythologized vanishing ranching world, as the widely reprinted press release about its construction put it: “The aim is to preserve records of the fast disappearing brands.”

Cattle brands of Ike T. Pryor (left) and Preston R. Rose (right) on Garrison Hall. Photographs by the author.

According to Dobie, one “can look at the buildings on the campus and trace the development of culture in Texas”.[14] But how representative were these brands really? Most of the thirty-two are trail-driving brands or belong to the century after 1836. The sample overrepresents late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American Texas ranching, even though Franciscan friars introduced ranching in the first half of the eighteenth century. Garrison Hall was built when Texas history was still heavily skewed towards the post-1836 period. Hispanic roots were acknowledged but marginalized. Dobie himself wrote about the Spanish period mostly as the background context for what later became Texas. In 1936, Carlos Castañeda began publishing his multivolume Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, which gave greater historical weight to the Hispanic legacy, along with the classic Borderlands scholarship of Herbert Bolton, leading the way for later historians like Jack Jackson, Jesús “Frank” de la Teja, and Andrés Tijerina.

Nevertheless, despite the curatorial bias, those Hispanic roots still made it into the Hall through style and shape. Hispanic brands used circular shapes and more intricate designs than the Anglo style of straight lines, sharp angles, and numbers. Some brands even blend both styles, reflecting the deep entanglements among peoples that characterize Texas history.

Yet, notable groups are absent, including Indigenous peoples such as the Caddo, Karankawa, Jumano, Lipan Apache, and Comanche, as well as enslaved and free Black communities. But they too should be invoked and remembered when looking at Garrison Hall and its cattle brands, because they were also knotted to Texas’s larger social fabric through cattle and horses. While the selection was based on a biased idea of Texas history, it still represents a way of life in which many peoples were involved: cowboys, owners, workers, raiders, traders, captives, fugitives, and neighbors. Ranching, as it developed in Texas, was not only an economic system but also a cultural and social web connecting the many peoples of the region.

Brand locator. On each side of Garrison Hall, the brands are listed from right to left as you face the building. All photographs by the author.

West side
Below the roofline: José Antonio de la Garza, José Antonio Navarro, Pedro Ibarbo, Mariano Sánchez.
Upper-floor windows: Stephen Austin, Richard King.

North side
Below the roofline: Herbert L. Kokernot, William T. Waggoner, Anna Martin and Sons, Al E. McFadden, George W. Saunders, Ike T. Pryor, Christopher C. Slaughter, John R. Blocker.
Upper-floor windows: George Littlefield, Swante M. Swenson.

North side brands 1. picture by the author

North side brands 2. picture by the author

East side
Below the roofline: Capitol Land Syndicate, Joe Hunter.

South side
Below the roofline: Dudley H. Snyder, E. B. Millett, Mark Withers, Dillard R. Fant, John T. Lytle, Martha Rabb (Cattle Queen of Texas), Ellison and Dewees, J. J. Myers, A. H. (Shanghai) Pierce, Oliver Loving and Sons, Charles Goodnight, Preston Rose, Samuel A. Maverick.
Upper-floor window: Samuel B. Burnett.

South side brands 1. picture by the author

South side brands 2. picture by the author

South side brands 3. picture by the author

[1] Austin Daily Texan, October 28, 1925, p. 3, Austin, Texas, US https://newspaperarchive.com/austin-daily-texan-oct-28-1925-p-3/

[2] Austin Daily Texan, December 09, 1925, p. 5, Austin, Texas, US https://newspaperarchive.com/austin-daily-texan-dec-09-1925-p-5/

[3] Austin Daily Texan, March 14, 1926, Pg. 7, Austin, Texas, US https://access.newspaperarchive.com/austin-daily-texan/1926-03-14/page-7/

[4] Jim Nicar, “The Big Enormous Building,” The UT History Corner, February 10, 2017, accessed August 14, 2026, https://jimnicar.com/2017/02/10/the-big-enormous-building/

[5] Henry Wiencek, “An Architectural History of Garrison Hall,” Not Even Past, October 12, 2012, https://notevenpast.org/architectural-history-garrison-hall/

[6] Cummins, Light Townsend. “History, Memory, and Rebranding Texas as Western for the 1936 Centennial.” This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell, vol. 9781574415179, 2013, pp. 37–57.

[7] Steven L. Davis, J. Frank Dobie, A Liberated Mind, Austin, UT Austin Press, 2009, pp. 75-78.

[8] Burlington Hawk Eye, May 09, 1926, Pg. 26, Burlington, Iowa, US

https://access.newspaperarchive.com/burlington-hawk-eye/1926-05-09/page-26

[9] Steven L. Davis, J. Frank Dobie, A Liberated Mind, Austin, UT Austin Press, 2009, pp. 63-81.

[10] Austin Daily Texan, June 20, 1926, Pg. 1, Austin, Texas, US https://newspaperarchive.com/austin-daily-texan-jun-20-1926-p-1/

[11] Llerena Friend, “Winkler, Ernest William,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed August 14, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/winkler-ernest-william.

[12] Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños, College Station, Texas A&M Press, 2006, pp. 540-542 and 562-565.

[13] Mt Pleasant Pyramid, October 15, 1926, Pg. 5, Mount Pleasant, Utah, US https://newspaperarchive.com/mt-pleasant-pyramid-oct-15-1926-p-5/

[14] Austin Daily Texan, June 20, 1926 Pg. 2, Austin, Texas, US https://newspaperarchive.com/austin-daily-texan-jun-20-1926-p-2/

José Roberto Campos Cordero is a Ph.D. student in History at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary History from the Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora and a B.A. in International Relations from El Colegio de México. His research focuses on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Texas, drawing on environmental, global, and cultural approaches. He is currently writing an environmental history of Texas centered on cattle and horses.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

La Mujer Unidad: Cynthia Orozco (UT History Honors Graduate ‘80)

By Nikki Lopez

“I think I drew it in my apartment, I drew a lot of posters for organizations from Austin to San Marcos,” Cynthia Orozco answered when I asked about the origins of the poster. Orozco further explained to me that feminist consciousness groups like this one were popular in the late 1970s. “It was just a place where we talked about sexism on campus with around ten Chicanas. It was a group where we felt safe.” Cynthia Orozco’s life was filled with many such posters, little moments of struggle that combined to make a difference in her life and the lives of the Chicanas who followed her at UT.

I interviewed Dr. Cynthia Orozco about her upbringing and her time at UT. Orozco grew up in Cuero, Texas, in a low-income, working-class family. Her mother, Aurora, passionately advocated for educational access for minorities and had been involved with the Mexican American civil rights movement since the 1950s. “My mother attended a segregated school. ‘Mexicans are stupid people’ was a phrase she heard frequently.” Aurora’s primary motivation behind her advocacy work was racial discrimination in Cuero schools that directly affected her own children. Later all seven of her children, including Aurora, would go on to attend The University of Texas at Austin. Orozco would continue to pursue her family tradition of activism. During her high school graduation speech, Orozco called for the school system to stop ignoring women and minorities and forcing boys to cut their hair. In retaliation, the school fired her from her student council position. “We knew that it was possibly illegal what they did, but at that time we really couldn’t do anything.”

Orozco found new opportunities and challenges at UT. Following a two-year stint at Southwest Texas University (now Texas State), Orozco enrolled at UT in 1978. During her time at UT, Orozco was able to experience first-hand how sexism and racism intertwined and left her out of place in the Chicano organizations. The underlying sexism in the movement was perpetuated by the idea of La Familia, which reinforced traditional, paternalistic patterns, and marginalized women and women’s issues in the Chicano movement. “I have learned that the Chicano movement is just that, a ChicanO movement which uses women as workers, sucks our life blood and does not return our due benefits,” Orozco wrote in an editorial for La Gente in 1981. For many in the Chicano movement, the needs of Chicanas were not important and sexism was normalized subconsciously. Discussions at group meetings focused on addressing racism and not sexism.

Letter from Cynthia Orozco

Throughout her life Cynthia Orozco spoke out against institutions that tried to suppress her and held firm to her beliefs. Orozco was constantly silenced and seen as a burden due to her vocalizing the need for Chicana representation during student-led meetings and conferences. Orozco recalled in her editorial for La Gente that during an organizing meeting for an event in 1979, she “was told by an activist that one woman was already included in the schedule” and there was no need for any more. The rationalization behind excluding women-centered sessions was that issues pertaining to police brutality and farmworkers’ rights were more important. Students in the group (including women) voted against the crucial inclusion of Chicana voices. Angry with Chicano groups, Orozco wrote an article called “On Chicana Unity” for The Daily Texan. She criticized her “brothers” for their lack of flexibility when considering the role Chicanas in the movement and prefered that their “sisters” remain home as mothers. Once while she was studying, Orozco received multiple calls from the UT Chicano Community leader screaming at her that she was causing the movement to be divisive and continuing to invalidate her Chicana identity. In a letter to a fellow feminist, Orozco wrote that “while I am still basically a feminist and believe in helping all people, my main area of concern is Women of Color.” Following in the tradition of radical feminists who came before her, Orozco established a feminist collective called the Chicana Consciousness Group. The collective met every Monday and became a home for many students on campus. Members were able to breathe and share their thoughts that they felt scared to share in other organizations.

Despite the struggles she faced, Orozco felt that UT was “one of the most academically, enriching universities out there.” UT helped her think outside the box and pushed her to take on an active role in writing and research. Beyond the Chicana Consciousness Group, Orozco used her position in student leadership roles to help other students learn from scholars. Orozco was Chair of the Chicano Culture Committee to invite women to share their research. “There was always something going on campus! I attended workshops and enjoyed the ones I planned as well.”

Despite our separation in time and space, I can see myself in Cynthia’s poster. During our interview Orozco mentioned that she began to have an identity crisis at UT. The feeling of not being Mexican or American enough is a struggle that I shared. Unlike Orozco I’ve had the privilege to take classes that are Chicana-centered. These classes were designed for people like Orozco and me.. They taught me that my feelings were valid and that my identity was seen. Orozco had to do this on her own with the resources she had. She advocated and created a space even though the work was exhausting. Thanks to her advocacy students like me have been able to navigate UT better.

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century

The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year. This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

Textbooks, Texas, and Discontent: The Fight against Inadequate Educational Resources

By Alejandra Garza and Maria Esther Hammack

Controversies surrounding textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas. For years, textbook selection in Texas has grabbed headlines and generated great discontent and debate. Textbooks adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) are unusually important because they are also adopted for use in classrooms across the country. Whatever Texas adopts, students across the United States get. In 2014, a coalition of unpaid Texas citizens who called themselves “Truth In Texas Textbooks,” presented the SBOE with a report containing 469 pages of factual errors, “imbalanced presentation of materials, omission of information, and opinions disguised as facts,” found in three world history and geography textbooks that were being considered for adoption that November. And who can forget the 2015 textbook fiasco, when the Texas Board of Education refused to allow professors to review and fact-check textbooks that were to be implemented in Texas curricula that year. Historians and other academics protested because non-experts were writing and reviewing history textbooks.

Photograph of a 2015 Texas textbook caption that grossly mischaracterized the nature of slavery — A 2015 Texas textbook caption grossly mischaracterized the nature of slavery (Coby Burren via the San Antonio Current).

But that was not the only contentious issue surrounding textbooks in Texas last year. Mrs. Roni Dean-Burren split open a Pandora’s box of controversies when she posted a picture on Facebook of her teenage son’s textbook which explicitly portrayed slaves as immigrant workers. The Texas State Board of Education had adopted the textbook, published by McGraw Hill, a few years ago and sold about 140,000 in Texas and other states. McGraw Hill was quick to respond and quench the controversy. They immediately acknowledged that they had made “a mistake” and rapidly agreed to do their “utmost to fix it.”

This year’s controversy has had a different outcome. Unlike McGraw Hill, Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, the authors of the Mexican American Heritage textbook and its publisher, Momentum Instruction, LLC, have yet to apologize for a widely criticized textbook. Beyond an unwillingness to acknowledge the large number of problems in their textbook, they have failed to respond to questions and comments from historians and experts challenging their work. The Mexican American Heritage textbook has more than 800 factual errors, errors of omission, and misleading representations of Mexican American history and culture.

Book cover of The Mexican American Heritage textbook by Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle — The Mexican American Heritage textbook (via authors).

In addition to factual errors, the book is riddled with what several historians have deemed “ethnic hostility” — clearly racist remarks, blatantly condescending portrayals of Mexican Americans and their historical roles, and a large number of specific instances where the authors’ opinions straightforwardly belittle Mexican-American history, heritage, and people of Mexican descent and their accomplishments and contributions. The authors and the publisher have refused to work with experts to fix the errors and have yet to demonstrate any intent to withdraw the book from consideration for adoption by the State Board of Education in hearings scheduled for November 15 and 18, 2016. The final decision pertaining to the adoption or rejection of the textbook is set to be made on November 18, 2016.

A textbook with an extensive number of errors, with clearly racist and condescending content does not belong in any classroom. Textbooks are meant to educate and empower our future generations through an emphasis on factual history and on understanding the heritage and identity of all the peoples of the country, but the Mexican American Heritage textbook is set to do just the opposite. Its content erases Mexican American history and culture and it presents historical information in manner that misinforms, rather than educates.

Black and white image of Moses Austin — Moses Austin, 1761-1821 (via Wikimedia Commons).

For instance, a passage in the book claims that “in 1822, Moses Austin obtained the first charter to start an American colony in Texas.” As most historians know, what Austin received was not a charter, but an offer for a land grant where up to 300 colonists could move and settle in Texas, then Mexican territory, with the stipulation that they swear allegiance to Mexico and become Mexican citizens. Also, expert historians made sure to note that Moses Austin died in 1821, so by 1822, the date provided in the textbook, Austin was in fact no longer alive and could not have obtained what the authors claimed was the first charter to colonize Texas.

Last month The Guardian reported that the passages in the textbook portray Mexican Americans as “anti-education and anti-English” and depict “true Mexican identity” as being inherently in rebellion against the establishment. They write that “High School and college youth may refuse to attend class, speak English or learn certain subjects because they perceive injustice in the school system,” and claiming Mexican American prosperity is hindered by their own identity. In addition to reports in the media, the Ad Hoc Committee, consisting of a group of scholars who took the initiative to read and review the textbook last spring, have highlighted some of the most disturbing errors. In chapter 3, for example, the authors wrote that “most Mexicans weren’t literate, they could not own land, and had been given the message that they should be subdued rather than lifted up. How would they invent a system from nothing that depended on participating in political and economic life?”[1] They portray Mexican Americans as having an all-encompassing cultural attitude of laziness that makes them put off important things for “mañana,” because, according to the textbook, they “have not been reared to put in a full day’s work so vigorously.”

Contrary to those portrayals, Mexican Americans and Mexican American scholars, historians and other professionals have begun the rigorous undertaking of meticulously reviewing the textbook by tabulating historical inaccuracies, listing factual errors, and conducting extensive and in depth analysis of the historical content of the textbook. The Mexican American scholars and the community were quick to organize in Austin and across Texas, and have managed to coordinate with other scholars, and historians across the country to write a strong case against the Mexican American Heritage textbook, so that it is not adopted by the Texas State Board of Education in the November hearings. The Ad Hoc Committee presented its report this past summer to the Texas State Board of Education’s Representative, Ruben Cortez, Jr., to explain why the proposed textbook was inadequate, how it failed to meet basic standards and guiding principles in the history profession. They provided an extensive list of suggested revisions to the publisher, suggestions that today, at one week until the hearing, have gone vastly unheeded.

Close-up photograph of the six flags over Texas emblems under state capitol dome — The Texas State Capitol (via Wikimedia Commons).

Here at UT Austin, the University of Texas Textbook Review Committee has six members working under the guidance of Dr. Emilio Zamora, of the UT Austin History Department, to produce a complete annotated list of factual errors, omissions, and misrepresentations, and also a list of suggested revisions. The committee’s goal is to serve historians and experts such as Dr. Zamora to prepare a written response based on their findings and historical evidence, to present to the Texas State Board of Education on November 15, and for that response to help prevent the Mexican American Heritage textbook from being adopted.

Despite the documented factual errors and wide criticism of the textbook, the hearing is not going to be an easy one. Conservative politicians have been supporting adoption of the textbook. For example, David Bradley, the Republican state representative for Southeast Texas on the Texas Board of Education, said that he had originally voted against the call for textbooks because he considers Mexican-American studies to be discriminatory against Americans of other ethnic backgrounds. He now plans to vote to adopt the book, because he is “going to give them what they asked for.” Bradley added “they wanted a course, and they wanted special treatment, and we had publisher step up.” He is intent on casting his vote for the adoption of this textbook.

The Main Building at the University of Texas - Austin (via Wikimedia Commons). — The Main Building at the University of Texas – Austin (via Wikimedia Commons).

Criticism of the textbook has come from historians across the nation, professional organizations, and activists’ platforms, including American Historical Association. In September, the AHA wrote a letter of concern to the Texas State Board of Education regarding the textbook because, they wrote, “the textbook does not adequately reflect the scholarship of historians who have worked in the field of Mexican American history, or measure up to the broad standards of history as a discipline.” The American Historical Association urged the Texas Board of Education “reject the use of this textbook as an option for institutions within the purview of the board’s adoption policies.”

We hope that more allies come to our support, and that many scholars, historians, educators, and students show up at the William B. Travis Building at the State Capitol for the hearings on November 15. It is imperative that textbooks such as The Mexican American Heritage do not get adopted. A textbook on Mexican Americans or Mexican American history or any other history that is filled with errors and racist allegations should not be used to educate our children, not now, not ever.

[1]District 2 Ad Hoc Committee Report on Proposed Social Studies Special Topic Textbook: Mexican American Heritage, presented to Ruben Cortez, Jr., State Board of Education Representative, September 6, 2016.

Board of Education agendas and information for the November 15th-18th meetings can be found here.
A map indicating the building location can be found here.
You can find out who your SBOE representative is here, and can contact members of the SBOE here.

You may also like:
Chris Babits offers Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy.
Christopher Rose recounts his experience testifying before the SBOE in this blog post.
NEP contributors relate what happens When a Government Tells Historians How to Write and How to Teach.

The Longhorns’ Resident Historian

By Nicholas Roland

Most days Clyde Rabb Littlefield may be found busily managing a real estate investment and property management business from a small office adorned with Longhorn sports memorabilia in the historic Robinson-Rosner building in downtown Austin. Littlefield holds two degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. ’53, M.A. ’57), neither of which is in the field of history, but everyone who knows him knows that Littlefield is first and foremost a historian, with a particular interest in the early history of the institution that he and his family have been intimately connected with for over a century.

Photograph of Clyde Rabb Littlefield standing next to a plaque memorializing his father — Clyde Rabb Littlefield standing next to a plaque memorializing his father.

As a native of Austin and two-time alumnus of UT, Littlefield bleeds burnt orange. In fact, his connection to the University of Texas is genetic. His father, Clyde Littlefield, was a legendary athlete and coach for the Longhorns. The elder Clyde was one of a duo of famous, albeit unrelated, Littlefields who left a significant mark on the University of Texas. George Washington Littlefield (1842-1920), a member of the Board of Regents and important early donor to the University, endowed the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, the iconic Littlefield Fountain, and the sometimes controversial South Mall statuary on the Forty Acres campus. In contrast, Pennsylvania-born Clyde Littlefield (1892-1981) began his career in Austin in the fall of 1912 as a freshman student athlete from the oil boom-town of Beaumont, Texas. By the time he graduated in the spring of 1916, Littlefield was a twelve-time letterman, an all-Southwest Conference athlete in football and basketball, an all-American in basketball, a conference hurdles champion in track, and had equaled the world record in high hurdles in 1914. According to his son, Littlefield only lost one race during his entire collegiate career. After a brief stint in the Army followed by some high school coaching, he returned to Austin and coached football, basketball, and track until 1962, winning twenty-five Southwestern Conference titles in track and field and two conference titles in football. Clyde Littlefield’s most enduring legacy at UT is the Littlefield Texas Relays, a major national track and field event. A campus road adjacent to the track stadium bears his name and he is memorialized in the Longhorn Hall of Honor and on a plaque located at the gate to Mike A. Myers Stadium.

Having virtually grown up in the shadow of the UT Tower, it was only logical that Clyde Rabb Littlefield would become a Longhorn himself. Upon entering the University in the fall of 1949, he enrolled in Air Force R.O.T.C., a new program on campus resulting from the Air Force’s establishment as a separate military branch in 1947. “Well,” recalls Littlefield with a laugh, “when I joined ROTC as a freshman it was not popular. And then the following summer the Korean War broke out, and to avoid the draft it became popular!” He graduated in the spring of 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in Government. After commissioning as an Air Force officer, Littlefield received orders to Korea and soon found himself on a troop ship crossing the Pacific Ocean. Arriving shortly after the cease-fire took effect on the Korean Peninsula, Littlefield’s unit decided that it needed a historian and he recalls that “they discovered that I minored in history.” This fortuitous discovery would have a major impact on Littlefield’s career for decades to come.

Second Lieutenant Littlefield was soon slotted as a unit historian, an assignment that proved very memorable for the young officer. After being assigned to Advance Headquarters in Seoul, Littlefield remembers being sent to the Demilitarized Zone in a Jeep with an armed escort to carry an important message to the United Nations commander: a North Korean MiG had been shot down in the first major incident after the July 27, 1953 cease-fire. He recalls that during this incident, “They didn’t trust electronic communications, so that’s why they sent me.” An assignment to Headquarters also meant that Littlefield had the opportunity to travel widely in East Asia and the Pacific. During his service in the Air Force he visited the Philippines, Japan, Thailand, Macaw, Hong Kong, and Iwo Jima in both official and unofficial capacities. Upon completion of his Active Duty service, Littlefield made the ten-day Pacific Ocean crossing to the United States on a troop ship.

A postcard view of UT's West Mall, ca. 1940 — A postcard view of UT’s West Mall, ca. 1940 (Image courtesy of The UT History Corner)

After returning to Austin, Littlefield pursued a master’s degree in Government at UT, graduating in 1958. His thesis, “American Assistance to Japan, 1945-1956,” was inspired by his experiences in war-torn East Asia, especially his realization that “in California seemingly so much concrete was around, relative to Japan or Korea.” After receiving his M.A., Littlefield worked briefly for Hughes Tool Company in Kansas, and subsequently found a job as a civilian historian for the Department of the Air Force. He continued to work as an Air Force historian for the next twenty years, retiring in 1980. Along the way Littlefield was able to continue his love of travel, living in such locations as Los Angeles, Kansas City, Wiesbaden, Germany, Honolulu, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. His stint in Hawaii encompassed Vietnam War operations and he later authored a white paper on the proposed B-1 Bomber while working in Washington, D.C. Upon retirement, Littlefield returned to his hometown and embarked on his current career in real estate investment and property management. Littlefield laughs when recalling the changes he found in Austin when he returned: “You know I naively thought when I was moving back here from [the] Washington, D.C. area that I was going to know everybody! Because when I was growing up we only had one high school, well one white high school anyway. So even though it was very large you tended to – if you didn’t know of somebody you knew somebody who knew somebody type thing. But of course, when I got back that didn’t exist at all.”

Clyde R. Littlefield’s interest in history did not end with retirement from the Air Force. Today he spends much of his free time researching the first decades of The University of Texas, exploring the origins of Roundup, Bevo, and “The Eyes of Texas” as well as the origins and fates of a wide range of individuals who shaped the early history of the school. In 2004 his research produced a book on the early history of Kappa Alpha, his fraternity while a student at UT. He has spent so much time at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History that he now sits on the advisory board for the internationally renowned archive.

Photograph of UT students gathering under the UT Tower to celebrate the annual Gone to Texas Night — UT students gather under the UT Tower to celebrate the annual Gone to Texas night (Image courtesy of Austin American-Statesman)

Through his research and his own lifetime of experience at UT, Littlefield has seen many sweeping changes. The athletics program has evolved from the days of student club teams that played and sometimes lost to prep school squads to a professionalized department generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. Littlefield recalls that the friendship between his mother and Rowena Bible, wife of Coach Dana X. Bible pre-dated Bible’s move from Texas A&M to UT, noting that “in those days people knew each other pretty well. There weren’t too many … extra coaches running around shall we say.” Overall, until recent decades athletics were “more amateurish, less commercial. Remember, we didn’t have commercial television here until the 1950s. I think the timing of any game was not driven by television. And it was very predictable. I remember, let’s say a football game, you almost always knew when it was going to start. Because that was the set time,” he concludes with a chuckle. The growth of the University itself has been equally astounding. Littlefield’s believes that “when I was in school and before, I think the University was more personal. And I’ve got the impression today it’s much more bureaucratic.”

Massive growth in the state of Texas, the city of Austin, and at UT have combined with wide ranging social changes to render the UT of 2013 a vastly different place from the slowly desegregating campus Clyde R. Littlefield encountered as a freshman in 1949, to say nothing of the small town university his father Clyde Littlefield entered in 1912. Whatever the future holds for The University of Texas, one thing is certain – the Littlefield name will remain synonymous with the Forty Acres, as it has for the past century.

Photo Credit:

Clyde Rabb Littlefield by Nicholas Roland

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